How I read magazines and newspapers #pocket

July 13, 2013

Believe it or not, I do still read both magazines and newspapers. Let’s get the newspaper thing over with. I subscribe to the AJC Thursday – Sunday edition to a) give me access to the digital content on their site and b) so I am forced to keep up with the goings-on in Atlanta. If I didn’t get the paper and have to walk to the end of the driveway and bring it back up to the house, I’d probably go a week or two without ever looking at Atlanta-based content. It’s important to me to stay connected on what’s happening in the city and this is my only way to ensure that currently. Oh, I also get the Atlanta Business Chronicle though that’s a subscription I get through work, so I’m not personally paying for it. I do enjoy the ABC.

Also, I still get a few magazines but the only ones that I pay for are ESPN the Magazine and Macworld. Macworld I read on the iPad so when I receive it in the mail I pretty much throw it in recycling unless I have a plane trip coming up. I pay for ESPN the Magazine because it gives you ESPN Insider access. That content and the AJC digital content is the only content on the web I actually pay for.

I also get a few magazines in the mail for free due to signing up for some promotion and they essentially make for airplane reading or recycle bin filling.

When I get these magazines I have a very simple process for “reading” them. I quickly scan through them and rip out any pages that I want to read. You can see in the below photo that after skimming through Men’s Journal and ESPN the Magazine I found a whopping total of two articles that I wanted to read. The fact that we’re in baseball season probably has something to do with that (not a fan).

I have switched from using Instapaper to read articles on my digital devices to using Pocket (formerly ReadItLater). I’m not sure why I switched but I can say I like the user interface of Pocket much better. I’ve been pretty good for the last month about going back to Pocket and reading articles I’ve saved but I’ve never been able to sustain that long term with these content storage apps, so we’ll see if that continues. For now, I’m a Pocket fan.

After I rip out the articles, I search for them on the web. When I find them I click on the Chrome Pocket Extension and the article is automatically added to my Pocket account. I can then read it on my phone, iPad or computer at any time. Or if I’m reading Feedly (my current Google Reader replacement) I can easily add articles to Pocket from there. And one of the great benefits of using an Android phone is that I can add any content from any app into Pocket, whereas on the iPhone you would need the app itself to have a Pocket function. With Android that is built in to the OS.